Jackson Pollock was an artist who became well-known for his abstract art. In particular, he had a style of drip painting where he used splatters of paint dripped onto flat canvases.

To some, this kind of splatter art can seem random. But abstract artists like Pollock excel at creating forms and shapes that seem to have an underlying meaning. Our brains WANT to form patterns in things, whether they’re splatters of paint on a canvas or the shapes of clouds in the sky. So splatter at random for a while, and see what your brain can make of it!

Have you ever tried to paint on a blank canvas? If so you may know that it’s very hard to go from nothing to something that’s beautiful, moving, or thought provoking.

It may seem like the great painters could naturally handle a blank canvas–that they just knew how to see things differently and paint amazing works. But when you go to an exhibition of artists like Pablo Picasso or Salvador Dali, you’ll see that they spent a lot of time sketching variations of the forms they were about to paint.

Picasso himself ended up painting 58 versions of another painter’s work (Las Meninas by Velazquez), to explore differences in style, color, and form! In Leonardo da Vinci’s sketchbooks you can see several sketches of the same person’s arm from slightly different angles, as well as concepts for flying machines that were centuries ahead of their time.

These artists knew one of the most important rules of design: To come up with something really different and impactful, you need to let yourself explore lots of possibilities. You need to open up your mind and express things, without the pressure of getting something right the first time that you put pen to paper. You need to splatter the paint for a while!

Then, when you have a lot of mess and color to look at, you’ll see patterns and find inspiration that you never would have seen if you stuck with your first idea.

In this adventure you will learn how to take a Solution Idea like the ones you SPARKED in the last chapter, and quickly generate a lot of different concepts related to it. We call this SPLATTER because, like splattering paint, you don’t worry too much about where it all lands - just get a bunch of ideas out in a visual way using techniques like sketching and posting up concepts. Once you have your concepts splattered on the wall or table, the patterns that you’ll find can be very interesting!

Why should we spend any time talking about concepts that seem impossible to create?

What You’ll Do:

Try your hand at the basics of sketching and learn about its importance when you’re generating ideas.

Go big or go home. Then go big at home! Create a large number of concepts in a group challenge, then keep going for the next 24 hours.

Learn how to find patterns in your splatter of ideas. Build on them or use them to splatter even more.

More on Concepts

Designers spend a lot of time generating and discussing concepts. A design concept is an idea that has not yet been fully developed into a product or service.

The concept can be something that exists only in your mind, or as a basic sketch on a piece of paper. It can also be a complete model of something that hasn’t yet been made available to everyone, like a concept car.

For the purposes of our adventure, we’ll be using basic sketches as concepts, like this concept for a puppy skateboard:

Why designers sketch concepts

Sketching is a quick method for expressing ideas in a visual way, rather than just using words. But why is it so important to express information visually? Here are a few of the many reasons:

Some concepts, such as emotions, have more impact when expressed visually. Which of these two boxes seem to have a bigger impact on you?

Images can also be more effective at communicating such things as the relationships between objects, and their relative sizes.

Signs are designed to communicate regardless of which language you speak. If you were on the beach in Japan and considering a swim, which sign would you rather have?

Verbal directions are useful for step-by-step instructions, but the visual form is often easier to grasp at a higher level, or to understand your current location.

Verbal and visual information activates different sides of your brain. If you’re not used to using both sides often, it can be difficult to get started. Let’s try a game that will exercise your ability to transcend the verbal/visual divide!

Game: Talk Sketchy to Me

Goal

Learn firsthand why a picture is worth a thousand words (or, in this case, at least 25!) by successfully getting your partner to guess the phrase you are drawing.

What You’ll Need

Pen & paper

Step 1: Choose Your Roles

Pick one person to be the artist, and another to be the guesser.

Step 2: Pick a Noteworthy Statement

The artist should flip to page 144 and pick a statement from the list. The person who is going to guess should NOT look at that list.

Step 3: Sketch Your Statement

The artist then begins to sketch that statement, using only pictures! That means no letters or numbers, but symbols - such as a star or a heart - are OK.

Step 4: Best Guessed

The guesser should immediately begin guessing words and phrases out loud to identify the full statement. If the guesser says a correct word, you may write it down at the top of the page. Each word guessed correctly can be written down in the correct order. Keep going until the guesser correctly says the entire statement out loud.

Step 5: Think Sketchy

What words were difficult to sketch? Which were easier? How did the artist use the paper to visually communicate how words related to each other? Can you isolate parts of the sketch where one image was able to capture several words?

Step 6: Replay Value

Have a big group and want to play again? Have teams compete against each other to see who can get it right first. (Level up the challenge: Have each team write the statement for the opposing team.)

Go digital: Play again but have the artist communicate solely through images found using Google Image Search.